Reflections, Reviews and News from the worlds of Opera and Classical Music

Tuesday, 3 October 2017

Staatsoper Hamburg: Parsifal

30 September 2017

Before being persuaded to direct the Ring for LA Opera at the beginning of the decade, Achim Freyer had
apparently decided to abandon directing opera to concentrate on painting. Now, however, he also gives a new Parsifal. And he’s staging Hänsel
und Gretel at the newly refurbished Staatsoper unter den Linden in Berlin
in December as well—that glorious work by a composer, Humperdinck, who was of
course intimately bound up with Parsifal’searly
history in Bayreuth.

In Hamburg his take on the Master’s great Bühnenweihfestspiel is a serious, often
enchanting piece of work, and a staging that is refreshing for
its patience, its willingness to take its time and its singlemindedness. His set, a dark semi-circle with multiple walkways set behind a
gauze stretched right over the orchestra pit, feels like its own self-contained
galaxy.

Numbers and hieroglyph-like objects are dotted about it as
if set free from both weight and significance; an adjustable mirrored
semi-circle hovers above, as does a big metal structure resembling the
mixing attachment of a food processor.

Swirls and various Parsifalian keywords are projected (video
by Jakob Klaffs and Hugo Reiss) at various moments onto the gauze, though were difficult to take in
from my seat in row 4 of the stalls. The players, their expressions frozen in
semi-grotesque face paint, drift in and out during the Prelude and seem barely to be
in command of their own destinies thereafter.

Kundry flies in, with the help of naïve stage effects (not always fully realised), at
her various entries; Parsifal bounces in and out and rolls about like some
malfunctioning children’s entertainer; Amfortas, stretched across some sort of
yoke, his body represented by a painted cloth, is manhandled from side to side by a couple of hooded retainers hovering
in a state of semi-invisibility. Titurel consists, in two dimensions, of little more than two arms, a wheelchair and what, to me at least, looked like stubby telescope.

Gurnemanz, a crude papier-mâché face suspended in a haphazardly spiralling frame above his head, glides around with little sense of purpose. Squires and
grail knights arm themselves in moments of threat with arbitrary objects: an
oversize spanner, a stuffed rabbit, a dismembered arm. At the climax of the
grail ceremony a small white figure with oversized head and an underlit
lampshade for a skirt makes its way slowly across the stage.

On one level it’s a magical mystery tour de force from
Freyer, who works with the music, surfing its slow-moving waves to sometimes
hypnotic effect. There are plenty of telling little details, too, not least in
the grotesque costume for Vladimir Baykov’s powerfully-sung, leering Klingsor:
an enormous tie covers a bright red patch in his groin, the site of the self-mutilation we see acted out wittily—if that’s the word—at the appropriate point Gurnemanz’s Act 1
narration. I liked the bulbous, punky voluptuousness of his Flower
Maidens, too, who manage to combine, like so much of the production, playful irreverence
with an underlying seriousness.

As the show progresses, though, it becomes a case of diminishing returns.Having cast
everything into a state weightlessness, Freyer has no interest, it seems, in tethering it back onto anything as the gravity of the final act’s drama
kicks in. The first half of that act, with only the merest hint, through
Sebastian Alphons’s lighting, of Easter greenery, resorts to a somewhat
conventional rehearsal of Wagner’s stage directions. And Wolfgang Koch, sounding slightly under par, was unable
to give specific meaning to his suffering as a bedraggled, lank-hared Amfortas.
With the action never having been allowed too fully take root, the final
redemption amounted simply to a further clearing of the decks, with the set
pulled down and whisked away. We are left with an emptiness both spatial and
conceptual.

Part of the sense of dissatisfaction here might also have
been down to Kent Nagano’s conducting. The orchestral playing
had some wobbles, but I enjoyed his streamlined but largely persuasive account of the
first two acts—are the conductor’s plans for a period-instrument Ring with Concerto Köln already
affecting his approach? The third act, however, felt almost evasive in its swiftness. The winding lines of the Prelude came across as dogged,
while elsewhere things remained somewhat earthbound, without conjuring up
enough of sense of anything, however difficult to define, being at stake.

None of this helped the cast, either. Kwangchul Youn’s Gurnemanz
provided superbly resonant and authoritative foundation for the drama, but was left unable, in the circumstances, to plumb the depths in Act 3, or really to make much of the text.

Andreas Schager’s Parsifal, dressed in asymmetric
black-and-white, sang powerfully and acted, as usual, with total commitment, but both he
and Claudia Mahnke’s impressive Kundry (rich in the lower register, seductive in the middle if stretched
at the top) struggled to convey their passions and sufferings through the
make-up and, in Mahnke’s case, industrial dreadlocks.

In a statement in the programme, Freyer talks, apparently
unironically, of being obliged to save the essential works of our time from the
mistakes of interpretation. That represents quite a lofty stance, and what he’s offered has its own special beauty and conviction. It doesn’t, however, really offer the compelling alternative he seems to be after.

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About Me

I am freelance critic, writer and musicologist based in Berlin. I have held editorial posts at Gramophone and Opera, was opera critic of the Spectator and have worked as a critic for the Daily Telegraph and Financial Times. I was editor of 30-Second Opera (Ivy Press, 2015), now also available – when I checked last – in French, German and Spanish. My PhD (awarded from King's College London in early 2011) was a critical reassessment of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal's 'Die Frau ohne Schatten'; further details of my academic work can be found under 'Publications and Papers'.
If you'd like to email me, I can be reached on hugojeshirley[at]gmail.com.

About this Blog

Fatal Conclusions is designed to serve as a modest outlet for various reviews (of varying levels of formality and punctuality) and ideas regarding what's going on in the Opera and Classical Music worlds--and, if I'm feeling adventurous, beyond. Thanks for popping by. I hope you enjoy reading and please feel free to leave comments.